Philosophy Updates

[C C]

The decline of criticism might explain the sense that our culture is stagnating
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/12-books/is-the-internet-making-culture-worse

EXCERPT: It’s obvious that artistic movements need artists. My claim is that they also need critics. Critics help name, describe, and contextualize movements. They historicize artists — to reveal what is novel and innovative — and make a persuasive case for what work will be important in the future. Critics, in short, tell the story of how art and culture have changed over time, and how it’s changing now. And without a compelling story, culture stagnates and wanes... (MORE - details)

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Experimental psychologist Charles Spence on how our senses shape how we eat
https://nautil.us/this-meal-might-bring-you-to-tears-1255467/

INTRO (excerpt): Charles Spence’s newest line of research connects biophilia to flavor: How glimpses of green, a whiff of cedar, or the call of a seagull can change what we choose to eat and how we think it tastes. Many high-end restaurants have begun experimenting with building the eating experience around nature-related sensory elements, such as sounds and smells and tactile pieces, sometimes to dramatic effect. We caught up with Spence shortly after his trip to a cloud forest outside of Bogotá, Colombia... (MORE - the interview)

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The plotless narrative as a tool for meaning-making
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/when-story-loses-the-plot/

EXCERPTS: A decade ago, the term “storytelling” was everywhere. [...] Then, almost without notice, the boom died down. Or, at least, the word faded as our collective fascination with storytelling moved on to other modes of organizing experience. And this shift matters, because the structures replacing the traditional story form today tell us as much about what we find meaningful as the form we’re leaving behind did. Stories have lost the plot, and other structures—characters, mood, identity labels, and games—are becoming the default frames for making meaning. The proliferation of stories suggested that everything—identity, politics, history, branding—was about telling a story. But what, exactly, is a story? (MORE - details)
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[C C]

Alison Gopnik on childhood learning, AI as a cultural technology, and rethinking nature vs. nurture
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/alison-gopnik/

INTRO: Alison Gopnik is both a psychologist and philosopher at Berkeley, studying how children construct theories of the world from limited data. Her central insight is that babies learn like scientists, running experiments and updating beliefs based on evidence. But Tyler wonders: are scientists actually good learners? It’s a question that leads them into a wide-ranging conversation about what we’ve been systematically underestimating in young minds, what’s wrong with simple nature-versus-nurture frameworks, and whether AI represents genuine intelligence or just a very sophisticated library.

Tyler and Alison cover how children systematically experiment on the world and what study she’d run with $100 million, why babies are more conscious than adults and what consciousness even means, episodic memory and aphantasia, whether Freud got anything right about childhood and what’s held up best from Piaget, how we should teach young children versus school-age kids, how AI should change K-12 education and Gopnik’s case that it’s a cultural technology rather than intelligence, whether the enterprise of twin studies makes sense and why she sees nature versus nurture as the wrong framework entirely, autism and ADHD as diagnostic categories, whether the success of her siblings belies her skepticism about genetic inheritance, her new project on the economics and philosophy of caregiving, and more... (MORE - the interview)

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The hidden role of pride and shame in the human hive
https://aeon.co/essays/the-hidden-role-of-pride-and-shame-in-the-human-hive

EXCERPTS: The Anglo-Dutch physician and philosopher Bernard Mandeville [...] thought of himself as a reader of disguised human motives, an anatomist of human nature, ready to show people what they are, rather than what they should be. He would accomplish this by keenly analysing human behaviours and institutions in terms of their motivating passions.

[...] In Mandeville’s view, human beings are driven by their self-regarding passions. We are always feeding them, even when they act contrary to self-interest – we feed them to the point of deceiving ourselves about our own motivations. Among the passions, the predominant force is pride...

[...] Pride, like other self-centered passions, is necessary for the flourishing of society, and Mandeville identifies in the self-regarding nature of human individuals the original, natural disposition to sociability... [...] For Mandeville, sociability is the result of an evolutionary process...

[...] The different forms of reciprocal adulation therefore have as their motivating force the constant need of human nature to experience and express self-liking. And this holds throughout the history of civilisation. ... Since the desire for praise is a universal property of human nature – central to Mandeville’s philosophical anthropology – a theory of sociability requires a sociohistorical account in order to show how self-regard assumes different shapes in different historical contexts... (MORE - details)

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Not thinking about anything: Toward a brain signature of mind blanking
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1110954

EXCERPTS: When we are awake, we seem to experience a continuous stream of sensations, reflections, memories, and impressions that make up our mental life. Yet some people report moments when they think about nothing at all. Is that even possible? Or is it an illusion caused by a memory bias?

“Mind blanking is defined as the complete absence of mental content that can be described to others. No mental images, no catchy tune looping in your head, no obsessive thoughts... nothing! This experience is often sought after by practitioners of meditation or mindfulness. But it isn’t confined to them: it seems to be very common after intense, prolonged cognitive effort—such as a university exam—or in cases of sleep deprivation,” explains Esteban Munoz-Musat, neurologist and former doctoral student in the Picnic Lab at Paris Brain Institute.

The definition of mind blanking is still debated within the scientific community. Hence, there is a need to better characterize this phenomenon, which could teach us more about the richness of our subjective experiences.

[...]“These observations suggest that during a mind blanking episode, participants had reduced access to sensory information from their environment,” explains Thomas Andrillon, senior author of the study. “These new data support an emerging idea: being awake does not necessarily mean being conscious of something. Mind blanking corresponds to a genuine interruption in the stream of thoughts.”

[...] “Our findings suggest that the structure of conscious experience is more like a mosaic of discrete states rather than a continuous mental film. A mosaic in which the absence of certain tiles results in brief moments of unconsciousness when the subject is awake,” concludes Lionel Naccache... (MORE - details)
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[C C]

Does our physical reality exist in an objective manner?
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/reality-objective-exist/

KEY POINTS: The old philosophical question, “If a tree falls in the forest but there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?” seems to obviously have an answer: yes. Whenever a tree falls, its trunk snaps, its branches collide with others, and it collides with the ground. Each one of those actions should make a sound [actually "sound" as pertains to gas vibrations, not the brain-produced mental experience or auditory manifestation of "sound"]. But relativity teaches us that the sound each observer experiences is relative to their position and motion, and quantum physics tells us that the act of observing changes the quantum state of this system. What does that all mean for the existence of “objective reality?” (MORE - details)

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The science (and pseudoscience) of everyday life
https://www.acsh.org/news/2025/12/24/science-and-pseudoscience-everyday-life-49887

EXCERPTS: Everyday life is full of small behaviors we treat as moral choices, scientific truths, or acts of civic virtue—often without much reflection. From abandoned shopping carts to climate guilt over pet ownership, from misplaced faith in statistical “significance” to misunderstandings of animal behavior, these examples reveal how intuition, habit, and oversimplified science shape what we believe.

[...] We are remarkably good at constructing moral narratives and scientific explanations that feel satisfying, even when they rest on shaky assumptions or misunderstood evidence. A little skepticism—about our own intuitions, about tidy conclusions, and about the limits of science itself—goes a long way... (MORE - details)

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Religion: a complicated or ambiguous category, yet indispensable as an identifier
https://aeon.co/essays/the-word-religion-resists-definition-but-remains-necessary

INTRO: We tend to think of religion as an age-old feature of human existence. So it can be startling to learn that the very concept dates to the early modern era. Yes, you find gods, temples, sacrifices and rituals in the ancient Mediterranean, classical China, pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. What you don’t find is a term that quite maps onto ‘religion’.

What about the Romans, to whom we owe the word? Their notion of religio once meant something like scruples or exactingness, and then came to refer, among other things, to a scrupulous observance of rules or prohibitions, extending to worship practices. It was about doing the right thing in the right way. The Romans had other terms as well for customs, rites, obligations, reverence and social protocols, including cultus, ritus and superstitio. Yet they weren’t cordoned off into a realm that was separate from the workaday activities of public life, civic duty and family proprieties. What the Romans encountered abroad were, in their eyes, more or less eccentric versions of cultic life, rather than alien ‘religions’, in our sense. It was assumed that other localities would have other divinities; in times of war, you might even summon them, via evocatio, to try to get them to switch sides. But the local gods and rites of foreigners could be assessed without categorising them as instances of a single universal genus.

Even after the empire became officially Christian, you still don’t get our sense of ‘religions’... (MORE - details)
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[TheVat]

quantum physics tells us that the act of observing changes the quantum state of this system. What does that all mean for the existence of “objective reality?”

Caveat: article doesn't adequately define that "observation" in physics can mean any interaction between particles. It doesn't require a conscious observer to collapse the wavefunction. A nucleus which absorbs a beta particle is an "observer." Through quantum decoherence, an environment is constantly "measuring" things.

 

[geordief]

Caveat: article doesn't adequately define that "observation" in physics can mean any interaction between particles. It doesn't require a conscious observer to collapse the wavefunction. A nucleus which absorbs a beta particle is an "observer." Through quantum decoherence, an environment is constantly "measuring" things.

Suppose we have an event (=an interaction between 2 "particles?) and this interaction is perceived by an intelligent observer , when and where is the wavefunction(s) collapsed?

Does it collapse at the site of the initial interaction ?

Does it also collapse when the signal emanating from this interaction meets the ocular nerve of the observer? (is it a different, secondary wavefunction,perhaps?)

Is there a third wavefunction that collapses when a signal is transmitted from the ocular nerve to the part of the brain that interprets the ocular signal in a cognitive way?

I realize that the intelligent observer may not be necessary but I wonder if the above scenario adds any extra complexity
to the model.

Is the intelligent observer in any sense different from the inanimate events?


Might the conscious mind possibly be connected to some feedback mechanism where wavefunctions collapse continuously in some kind of a feedback mechanism?

 

[TheVat]

Suppose we have an event (=an interaction between 2 "particles?) and this interaction is perceived by an intelligent observer , when and where is the wavefunction(s) collapsed?

Does it collapse at the site of the initial interaction ?

Does it also collapse when the signal emanating from this interaction meets the ocular nerve of the observer? (is it a different, secondary wavefunction,perhaps?)

Is there a third wavefunction that collapses when a signal is transmitted from the ocular nerve to the part of the brain that interprets the ocular signal in a cognitive way?

I realize that the intelligent observer may not be necessary but I wonder if the above scenario adds any extra complexity
to the model.

Is the intelligent observer in any sense different from the inanimate events?


Might the conscious mind possibly be connected to some feedback mechanism where wavefunctions collapse continuously in some kind of a feedback mechanism?

This was the difficulty behind Eugene Wigner's famous "Wigner's Friend" paradox, which Wigner himself later dismissed as a reductio ad absurdum. I like Carlo Rovelli's resolution of observer issues, with Relational QM. Here's a snip from the Wigner's Friend wiki...

(RQM) was developed in 1996 by Carlo Rovelli and is one of the more recent interpretations of quantum mechanics. In RQM, any physical system can play the role of an observing system, to which any other system may display "facts" about physical variables. This inherent relativity of facts in RQM provides a straightforward "solution" to the seemingly paradoxical situation in Wigner's friend scenario: The state that the friend assigns to the spin is a state relative to himself as friend, whereas the state that Wigner assigns to the combined system of friend and spin is a state relative to himself as Wigner. By construction of the theory, these two descriptions do not have to match, because both are correct assignments of states relative to their respective system.

 

[exchemist]

Suppose we have an event (=an interaction between 2 "particles?) and this interaction is perceived by an intelligent observer , when and where is the wavefunction(s) collapsed?

Does it collapse at the site of the initial interaction ?

Does it also collapse when the signal emanating from this interaction meets the ocular nerve of the observer? (is it a different, secondary wavefunction,perhaps?)

Is there a third wavefunction that collapses when a signal is transmitted from the ocular nerve to the part of the brain that interprets the ocular signal in a cognitive way?

I realize that the intelligent observer may not be necessary but I wonder if the above scenario adds any extra complexity
to the model.

Is the intelligent observer in any sense different from the inanimate events?


Might the conscious mind possibly be connected to some feedback mechanism where wavefunctions collapse continuously in some kind of a feedback mechanism?

Any interaction involving a quantum system causes its properties to crystallise into definite values. It does not matter whether an observer is present or not.

An observer may be able to perceive the interaction by looking at its outcome, later. That would avoid participating in the interaction and thereby affecting it.

There is nothing in QM to suggest observation by a conscious or intelligent observer has anything to do with it. The popular misconception to the contrary is a result of the language used by the developers of the theory in the early days, which talked in terms of observable properties and hence of observers making observations. Pauli, for one, made it clear that “observation” referred just to interaction with the inanimate measuring apparatus employed in the measurement.

 

[geordief]

Any interaction involving a quantum system causes its properties to crystallise into definite values. It does not matter whether an observer is present or not.

An observer may be able to perceive the interaction by looking at its outcome, later. That would avoid participating in the interaction and thereby affecting it.

There is nothing in QM to suggest observation by a conscious or intelligent observer has anything to do with it. The popular misconception to the contrary is a result of the language used by the developers of the theory in the early days, which talked in terms of observable properties and hence of observers making observations. Pauli, for one, made it clear that “observation” referred just to interaction with the inanimate measuring apparatus employed in the measurement.

Would an example of a quantum system be a single particle traveling in spacetime whose position and momentum at any particular time is described by its wavefunction?

And that wavefunction is reset whenever it "collides" with another particle with another wavefunction?

If that is along the rightlines, would 2 wavefunctions interfere with each other ?

Oh, and is QFT part of the show?

 

[exchemist]

Would an example of a quantum system be a single particle traveling in spacetime whose position and momentum at any particular time is described by its wavefunction?

And that wavefunction is reset whenever it "collides" with another particle with another wavefunction?

If that is along the rightlines, would 2 wavefunctions interfere with each other ?

Oh, and is QFT part of the show?

First of all, I know nothing about QFT, but yes the system is sort of reset after an interaction.

Opinions seem to vary as to what the wave function really is. One school of thought is that it is somehow a real thing. Another school contends it is just a mathematical statement of information about the system, based on the last time it interacted. Rovelli thinks it is a statement of information, in a particular informational frame of reference, rather than intrinsic to the system itself. Hence for instance Schrödinger's Cat has a wavefunction that is a superposition (linear combination) of both alive and dead components, in the informational frame of reference outside the box, but from the perspective of a frame of reference inside the box, it is one or the other, i.e. a different wave function applies.

I think it is probably best to regard the wave function as a piece of mathematics for predicting the range of possible values of properties of the system when it next interacts. Though in practice we tend, perhaps lazily, to treat it as a physical thing.

 

[geordief]

First of all, I know nothing about QFT, but yes the system is sort of reset after an interaction.

Opinions seem to vary as to what the wave function really is. One school of thought is that it is somehow a real thing. Another school contends it is just a mathematical statement of information about the system, based on the last time it interacted. Rovelli thinks it is a statement of information, in a particular informational frame of reference, rather than intrinsic to the system itself. Hence for instance Schrödinger's Cat has a wavefunction that is a superposition (linear combination) of both alive and dead components, in the informational frame of reference outside the box, but from the perspective of a frame of reference inside the box, it is one or the other, i.e. a different wave function applies.

I think it is probably best to regard the wave function as a piece of mathematics for predicting the range of possible values of properties of the system when it next interacts. Though in practice we tend, perhaps lazily, to treat it as a physical thing.

I have seen a simulation of the waveform of a traveling particle and it does look "real" to me but also like a mathematical model.

Maybe the mathematical model works the same way as our own senses.

For example if we put on infrareds for a long enough time we would think that was how the world "really" looks.

So ,in that way that mathematical model is like a filter on the (only) way we can see that system.

Are there as many "realities" as we have ways to categorise or contextualise them? None is "correct" but some are more useful?

I asked about QFT since I think that "particles" are seen in it as excitations of their quantum field and I hope that that is the accepted model across all the interpretations so that don't have to learn another way of looking at it when we are talking about things like the collapse of the wavefunction and all the other strange goings on among the "little people"(tunnelling,superposition,entanglement and so on)

 

[C C]

Who should decide the role of AI in the future of medicine?
https://aeon.co/essays/who-should-decide-the-role-of-ai-in-the-future-of-medicine

EXCERPTS: . . . patient demand is surging. Populations are growing, ageing, and living longer with chronic illnesses like cancer, diabetes and dementia. By 2030, the world will face an estimated shortage of around 10 million health workers.

[...] In the US, it is estimated that around 800,000 people die or become permanently disabled each year from diagnostic error alone. At this point, many argue that the solution lies with technology. If errors are inevitable in human hands, perhaps machines can steady them, or even replace them altogether.

[...] I want to examine a prior assumption: that doctors themselves must be the arbiters of whether technology can replace them, or even that doctors should be central to the conversation at all. Instead, in the spirit of philosophical enquiry, with as big a question as who or what should deliver patient care, we need to demonstrate parity and fairness. We rightly scrutinise Big Tech and suspect its motives and methods, but medicine is no less conflicted. To presume that doctors should arbitrate their own indispensability is to let the most interested party preside as judge and jury.

In this essay, then, I turn the lens not on AI itself, but on the presupposition that physicians ought to be the ones deciding whether Dr Bot can – or should – take their place. It is such a common assumption that it tends to move camouflaged within our conversations about the future of clinics.

Doctors are enmeshed in the very system under scrutiny. Their status, salaries and sense of self are bound up in the debate. Of course they want to believe they’re irreplaceable. But history shows that those most invested in their own survival are rarely the best judges of their own irreplaceability... (MORE - details)
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[C C]

Does physics say that free will doesn't exist?
https://www.space.com/science/particle-physics/does-physics-say-that-free-will-doesnt-exist

EXCERPT: One of the bedrock philosophical concepts under all of physics is something called causal determinism. It says that every effect has a cause, and that if you know the current state of a system, you can use the power of physics to predict how it behaves. If effects happened without causes, then there wouldn't be much need for physics. And if we couldn't predict how systems would behave, then we wouldn't be very good at our jobs.

[...] So, at first glance, it seems like our understanding of physics forbids free will. We don't really have a choice, because if we had perfect knowledge of all the molecules and electrical activity in our brains, then we must be able to determine our choices in advance. But there are three aspects of physics that add some wrinkles to this line of thinking... (MORE - details)
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COMMENT: Seems to revolve around the usual view that "free will" is dependent on randomness rather than the autonomy of an internally governed biological body. While a slight degree of randomness introduced into the human system would not undermine the overarching regulation of it, a massive amount would destroy the functional organization and existence of a natural entity that has the capacity to have preferences and then make choices based on those personal biases.

To abandon or undermine those "likes and dislikes" that are succeeding for you would be to behave as unpredictably as an insane individual -- a skewered yet perversely popular requirement for free will (radical unpredictability or unbridled random selection and behavior) that no one -- who can apprehend the disastrous consequences of that -- would actually want.

You also have the ability to reprogram yourself to new habits, if those old ones are part of a destructive lifestyle. The latter might be deemed the central element of "soft compatibilism" that stands out as free will, which accordingly requires belief in free will (you can't re-program yourself if you wallow in the fatalistic opposite belief of that).

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Reality is evil
https://aeon.co/essays/philosophers-must-reckon-with-the-meaning-of-thermodynamics

EXCERPTS: We have yet to conceive of reality as it truly is. Instead, philosophers cling to an ancient idea of the Universe in which everything keeps growing and flourishing. According to this view, existence is good. Reality is good. [...] Indeed, from Plato onwards, philosophers have generally agreed that living well means aligning with the rational order of the cosmos.

[..] Even in the 21st century, this picture of the Universe informs how we think we should live. It fuels our moral handwringing over the so-called Anthropocene, the notion that our planet has been fundamentally altered by human action. It motivates our attempts to develop ‘sustainable’ environmental policies and drives our escapist fantasies of ‘getting back to nature’. All that is wrong might be put to rights, we think, if only we could find a way to live within the purely creative and inherently benevolent order of existence.

Unfortunately, these long-held assumptions and aspirations are no longer tenable. In fact, our most excessive actions as a species - destroying rainforests, causing widespread extinction, altering the ocean’s chemistry, ‘time-bombing the future’ with forever chemicals and more - are perfectly in keeping with the ultimate aims of the Universe.

Reality, as we now understand, does not tend towards existential flourishing and eternal becoming. Instead, systems collapse, things break down, and time tends irreversibly towards disorder and eventual annihilation. Rather than something to align with, the Universe appears to be fundamentally hostile to our wellbeing... (MORE - details)
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COMMENT: But while there is that moral hand-wringing about the menace of capitalism and its destructive fruits afflicting the world and society, there is also literary intellectual crusading that could be packaged under the category of anti-naturalism. Where the natural world (especially with respect to biology) is regarded as inherently unjust and wicked. Granted, though, the original Marxist camp was fully on board with ways of the physical world and the belief that via interaction of opposites (dialectical materialism) a socioeconomic utopia would eventually be outputted (instantiation of communist paradise). Starts out with nature being oppressive, maybe, but such is fated to evolve into something nicer.
_

 

[exchemist]

Does physics say that free will doesn't exist?
https://www.space.com/science/particle-physics/does-physics-say-that-free-will-doesnt-exist

EXCERPT: One of the bedrock philosophical concepts under all of physics is something called causal determinism. It says that every effect has a cause, and that if you know the current state of a system, you can use the power of physics to predict how it behaves. If effects happened without causes, then there wouldn't be much need for physics. And if we couldn't predict how systems would behave, then we wouldn't be very good at our jobs.

[...] So, at first glance, it seems like our understanding of physics forbids free will. We don't really have a choice, because if we had perfect knowledge of all the molecules and electrical activity in our brains, then we must be able to determine our choices in advance. But there are three aspects of physics that add some wrinkles to this line of thinking... (MORE - details)
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COMMENT: Seems to revolve around the usual view that "free will" is dependent on randomness rather than the autonomy of an internally governed biological body. While a slight degree of randomness introduced into the human system would not undermine the overarching regulation of it, a massive amount would destroy the functional organization and existence of a natural entity that has the capacity to have preferences and then make choices based on those personal biases.

To abandon or undermine those "likes and dislikes" that are succeeding for you would be to behave as unpredictably as an insane individual -- a skewered yet perversely popular requirement for free will (radical unpredictability or unbridled random selection and behavior) that no one -- who can apprehend the disastrous consequences of that -- would actually want.

You also have the ability to reprogram yourself to new habits, if those old ones are part of a destructive lifestyle. The latter might be deemed the central element of "soft compatibilism" that stands out as free will, which accordingly requires belief in free will (you can't re-program yourself if you wallow in the fatalistic opposite belief of that).

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Reality is evil
https://aeon.co/essays/philosophers-must-reckon-with-the-meaning-of-thermodynamics

EXCERPTS: We have yet to conceive of reality as it truly is. Instead, philosophers cling to an ancient idea of the Universe in which everything keeps growing and flourishing. According to this view, existence is good. Reality is good. [...] Indeed, from Plato onwards, philosophers have generally agreed that living well means aligning with the rational order of the cosmos.

[..] Even in the 21st century, this picture of the Universe informs how we think we should live. It fuels our moral handwringing over the so-called Anthropocene, the notion that our planet has been fundamentally altered by human action. It motivates our attempts to develop ‘sustainable’ environmental policies and drives our escapist fantasies of ‘getting back to nature’. All that is wrong might be put to rights, we think, if only we could find a way to live within the purely creative and inherently benevolent order of existence.

Unfortunately, these long-held assumptions and aspirations are no longer tenable. In fact, our most excessive actions as a species - destroying rainforests, causing widespread extinction, altering the ocean’s chemistry, ‘time-bombing the future’ with forever chemicals and more - are perfectly in keeping with the ultimate aims of the Universe.

Reality, as we now understand, does not tend towards existential flourishing and eternal becoming. Instead, systems collapse, things break down, and time tends irreversibly towards disorder and eventual annihilation. Rather than something to align with, the Universe appears to be fundamentally hostile to our wellbeing... (MORE - details)
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COMMENT: But while there is that moral hand-wringing about the menace of capitalism and its destructive fruits afflicting the world and society, there is also literary intellectual crusading that could be packaged under the category of anti-naturalism. Where the natural world (especially with respect to biology) is regarded as inherently unjust and wicked. Granted, though, the original Marxist camp was fully on board with ways of the physical world and the belief that via interaction of opposites (dialectical materialism) a socioeconomic utopia would eventually be outputted (instantiation of communist paradise). Starts out with nature being oppressive, maybe, but such is fated to evolve into something nicer.
_

Oh Jesus, spare us this hysterical American hyperventilation.

Physics does not say every effect has a cause. I think he's made that up. Anyone familiar with QM or radioactive decay, or indeed chaos theory, knows this. So it is not a surprise to find that free will is not ruled out by physics after all. He is knocking down an Aunt Sally.

As for the hand-wringing about an evil universe, this is typical American Hobbesian dystopianism - and grossly overdone. Sure, thermodynamics tells us entropy increases in spontaneous processes, but this quite evidently does not mean that everything is in decline and falling into decay. On the contrary, the engine of entropy increase also drives the formation of highly ordered structures in nature, from galaxies to living things, without any conflict. Sure, eventually the universe will run down, like a clockwork mechanism, but it is a ridiculous counsel of despair to interpret that eventual fate - in the unimaginably far future - as vitiating everything we see around us during the lifespan of humanity.

On the contrary, statistical thermodynamics teaches us that the laws of nature, operating on randomness at the molecular level, give rise to a range of orderly properties at the macro level, enabling us to predict the behaviour of substances and chemical reactions between them. It is a wonderful story of how order can emerge from apparent chaos.

What is wrong with these guys?

 

[C C]

[...] What is wrong with these guys?

Publish or perish.

 

[C C]

Science has always been marketed, from 18th-century coffeehouse demos of Newton’s ideas to today’s TikTok explainers
https://theconversation.com/science...tons-ideas-to-todays-tiktok-explainers-267707

EXCERPTS: Scientific theories do not simply reveal themselves; they compete for attention, credibility and uptake. [...] In this view, science is not outside the market, but inside a public arena where claims vie for audiences, resources and belief – and where power, persuasion and social position shape which ideas are heard, trusted or forgotten.

[...] Although Newton himself was a recluse, a circle of zealous Newtonian men of science, described by historians as devoted disciples and even evangelists for Newton’s natural philosophy, took his new theories on the road...

[...] Historian of science Jeff Wigelsworth showed that Newton’s evangelizers built what today might be called a brand: experiences, artifacts and emotions that linked scientific authority to Enlightenment ideals of reason and progress, and to their own personalities.

My own research finds that these men of science also used a suite of early marketing activities. Besides developing products to sell to promote Newtonian science, they came up with promotions that targeted different audiences, adjusted their pricing and used varied distribution strategies.

[...] Three centuries later, the marketing of science is more visible, and more complicated, than ever... (MORE - details)

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The Masculine Mystique
https://thepointmag.com/criticism/the-masculine-mystique/

EXCERPTS: But of course Frankenstein was written by a woman. Today, most writing and reading are done by women [...] There’s something perverse in using the consumption of such writing to conclude that most books are now for women, as though watching a lot of porn would make men into cinephiles. But the trend .... is deep in gender polarization, which affects everything from TikTok content recommendations to voting patterns to dating practices.

Many of my most beautiful female friends are self-styled “femcels.” Well-admired but confoundingly dateless and sexless, they are exposed to virtually no “content” that adequately represents male perceptions and experiences, and are protected by contemporary social etiquette and by men themselves from conversations and interactions that would forcefully get such things across...

[...] Perhaps all that has happened is that women of this generation simultaneously believe their elders about what men are and yet have continued to desire men. If men are monsters, if masculinity is a monstrosity, but women keep desiring men, and the more masculine the better, then women must desire monstrosity. This has a certain intuitiveness, and it helps to explain the seeming contradiction in the desires of ambitious self-proclaimed feminists like Romy being aroused by domination.

It also helps to explain the virally popular New York Times article from this summer about “heterofatalism,” in which the author Jean Garnett suggests that heterosexuality might be doomed, and that it might be men’s fault. Turned down for sex, she writes: “We all cooed and moaned for the poor wittle fraidy-cat boo-boo, working ourselves into a frenzy of laughter over men’s inability to ‘man up and [expletive] us.’” When one is so convinced that male appetites are insatiable carnivore engines of carnal enmeshment it is only logical to see men’s refusal to [__] them as a loss of masculinity—a failure of men to be men... (MORE - details)

RELATED: How "femcels" differ from incels
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5 lessons about misinformation from ancient Greek and Roman scientists
https://theconversation.com/5-lesso...rom-ancient-greek-and-roman-scientists-270941

EXCERPT: Because these scientific beliefs are so different from our own, it may seem we have nothing to learn from long-dead scientists. However, thinkers 2,500 years ago already faced many problems that are today amplified by social media and artificial intelligence (AI), such as how to tell truth from fiction. Here are five lessons from ancient Greek and Roman science that ring surprisingly true in the face of misinformation in the modern world... (MORE - details)

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What your life would be like without an inner voice
https://www.sciencefocus.com/wellbeing/inner-speech-anendophasia

EXCERPT: Most of us experience an inner voice at some point. We might call it an internal monologue, thinking in words or talking in our head; psychologists call it ‘inner speech’. But there’s growing evidence that some people have no inner voice at all.

“I have no speech or words in my mind whatsoever. It’s always been that way for me,” says Jesse Koski, a 34-year-old who lives in Finland. “I’d always assumed that other people’s minds worked in the same way as mine.”

Psychologists recently coined a term for this phenomenon – ‘anendophasia’ – and now they’re trying to understand how common it is and how it affects those who experience it... (MORE - details)

 

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Scathing scholar and reviewer who held sacred cows in little respect, dies aged 91
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/obituaries/article/john-carey-obituary-literary-critic-mxjvmfxml

EXCERPTS: John Carey, regarded by many as the finest literary critic of the last 50 years, liked to begin a book review with an arresting declaration. [...] Unafraid of expressing moral judgments, he took aim at elites of every stripe: poseurs, ideologues, charlatans, fantasists and crypto-fascists.

[...] Carey was no respecter of reputations, even at Nobel prize level. Reviewing a biography of Yeats, he wrote: “Was he really all that intelligent? He was substandard at school. He never learned to spell … His gullibility was seemingly fathomless. Mysticism and magic occupied much of his waking and sleeping life. In his relations with Maud Gonne he comes across as a credulous simpleton.”

[...] “In a perfect world,” wrote Julie Burchill, “intellectuals would be original, logical, funny and full of common sense. That is, they would be like John Carey.” (MORE - details)

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(review) "Capitalism" by Sven Beckert – an extraordinary history of the economic system that controls our lives
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...f-the-economic-system-that-controls-our-lives

EXCERPTS: The Eurocentric version of capitalism’s history holds that it grew out of democracy, free markets, Enlightenment values and the Protestant work ethic. Beckert, a Harvard history professor and author of 2015’s prize-winning Empire of Cotton, assembles a much more expansive narrative, spanning the entire globe and close to a millennium.

[...] “No religion, no ideology, no philosophy, has ever been as all-encompassing as the economic logic of capitalism,” Beckert claims, defining it as “the ceaseless accumulation of privately controlled capital”.

[...] The word “capitalism” originated in France in the 1840s, around the same time as its antagonists “socialism”, “communism” and “anarchism”, but the system was much older. “Capitalism is a process,” Beckert writes, “not a discrete historical event with a beginning and an end”. He begins tracking the process in the port of Aden in 1150...

[...] Karl Marx, of course, believed that capitalism had an expiration date, but so did the conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter, who asked in 1942: “Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can.” Yet every Jeremiah underrated its remarkable survival instincts. Infinitely adaptable, agnostic about nations and creeds, and essentially amoral, it keeps on going.

[...] The question that Beckert never quite answers is: why capitalism? While it’s hard to argue with his copious evidence of capitalism’s poisonous offspring ... there must be more to it than war, slavery, imperialism and inequality. Even Marx and Engels gave the devil his due in The Communist Manifesto: for all its savagery, it had “accomplished wonders”... (MORE - details)
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Zeno’s Paradox resolved by physics, not by math alone
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/zenos-paradox/

KEY POINTS: Over 2000 years ago, the Greek philosopher Zeno posed a paradox: before you can ever reach your destination, you must travel halfway there, always leaving another half. If there’s always a smaller “half” to be taken, how could you ever arrive at the place you’re headed? For millennia, Zeno’s Paradox stumped thinkers everywhere. While there are many mathematical attempts to solve it, the true answer, in our reality, comes from physics, and understanding rates: the relationship for how distances change over time... (MORE - details)

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Quantum mechanics works, but it doesn't describe reality
https://iai.tv/articles/quantum-mechanics-works-but-it-doesnt-describe-reality-auid-3461?_auid=2020

INTRO: Physicists like Sean Carroll argue not only that quantum mechanics is not only a valuable way of interpreting the world, but actually describes reality, and that the central equation of quantum mechanics – the wave function – describes a real object in the world. But philosophers Raoni Arroyo and Jonas R. Becker Arenhart warn that the arguments for wave-function realism are deeply confused.

At best, they show only that the wave function is a useful element inside the theoretical framework of quantum mechanics. But this goes no way whatsoever to showing that this framework should be interpreted as true or that its elements are real. The wavefunction realists are confusing two different levels of debate and lack any justification for their realism. The real question is: does a theory need to be true to be useful? (MORE - details)

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Evidence isn’t binary: What the NFL teaches us about scientific confidence
https://beyondtheabstract.substack.com/p/evidence-is-non-binary

EXCERPT: There is no such thing as a perfect research paper… or if a perfect study does exist, it is exceedingly rare… Some might even say, suspicious. Every study has limitations—measurement error, bias, confounding, underpowered subgroups, imperfect outcomes, or analytical decisions that could reasonably have gone another way. There will be dropouts, short timeframes, and various assumptions—each of which can be called into question.

A high-quality study doesn’t mean flawless. It means the flaws are smaller, better understood, and less likely to overturn the main conclusion. Just as great NFL teams will usually (but not always), beat terrible teams, stronger studies are more likely to be true—not guaranteed to be true. On the flip side, sometimes a bad team can defeat the reigning Super Bowl champion; and occasionally, a low-quality study will reveal a signal that survives more rigorous replication... (MORE - details)
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Distinct AI models seem to converge on how they encode reality
https://www.quantamagazine.org/dist...converge-on-how-they-encode-reality-20260107/

EXCERPT: A growing body of research has found that different AI models can develop similar representations, even if they’re trained using different datasets or entirely different data types. What’s more, a few studies have suggested that those representations are growing more similar as models grow more capable.

In a 2024 paper, four AI researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argued that these hints of convergence are no fluke. Their idea, dubbed the Platonic representation hypothesis, has inspired a lively debate among researchers and a slew of follow-up work.

The team’s hypothesis gets its name from a 2,400-year-old allegory by the Greek philosopher Plato. In it, prisoners trapped inside a cave perceive the world only through shadows cast by outside objects. Plato maintained that we’re all like those unfortunate prisoners. The objects we encounter in everyday life, in his view, are pale shadows of ideal “forms” that reside in some transcendent realm beyond the reach of the senses.

The Platonic representation hypothesis is less abstract. In this version of the metaphor, what’s outside the cave is the real world, and it casts machine-readable shadows in the form of streams of data. AI models are the prisoners. The MIT team’s claim is that very different models, exposed only to the data streams, are beginning to converge on a shared “Platonic representation” of the world behind the data.

“Why do the language model and the vision model align? Because they’re both shadows of the same world,” said Phillip Isola, the senior author of the paper.

Not everyone is convinced... (MORE - details)

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How well-meaning allies can increase stress for marginalized people
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1112179

INTRO: Someone in the office makes a racially insensitive comment, and a white co-worker asks a Black colleague to help correct the offender.

In three studies, a Cornell University researcher found that this kind of maneuver can backfire. In such scenarios, the marginalized person then views the person who asked for their help less favorably – and is less likely to want to associate with them in the future.

“A marginalized person’s willingness to get involved in confronting prejudice is much more complicated than simply just trying to reduce prejudice in the workplace,” said Merrick Osborne, professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University. “Oftentimes it is asking them to do work, and it can put a burden on them. We find that, for marginalized people, being asked by an ally to speak up against a prejudice confrontation is more emotionally burdensome than not being asked. In turn, that shapes how the ally is viewed.”

Osborne is a co-author of “A (Costly) Penny for Your Thoughts? Allies Cause Harm by Seeking Marginalized Group Members’ Help When Confronting Prejudice.”.

In the early days of the Black Lives Matter and other movements, Osborne noticed that members of marginalized groups were being called on to comment about sensitive issues – such as the police killing of Breonna Taylor in March 2020 – just because of their membership in the group, and not because of any particular expertise.

“I thought that was really interesting,” Osborne said. “We social scientists haven’t fully unpacked how marginalized people experience addressing prejudice within the workplace, and there’s an assumption that marginalized folks have more knowledge about prejudice and how to reduce it... (MORE - details, no ads)

 

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Aliens might not have the same physics as us
https://iai.tv/articles/aliens-might-not-have-the-same-physics-as-us-auid-3466?_auid=2020

INTRO: If we ever meet aliens, would their physics be the same as ours? While this might seem like a purely hypothetical, abstract question, it has profound consequences for what the pursuit of scientific truth actually is. Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, Daniel Whiteson, argues that if alien physics is different from ours, then our theories are not as objective and universal as we often believe... (MORE - details)

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Why I am immortal
https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/why-i-am-immortal

INTRO: Today is my birthday. Many people fear their birthday, seeing aging as one step closer to death and birthdays as mere milestones of doom. Not me! I am immortal, and I’m going to prove it with my fearsome philosophical powers. In fact, I have ten flawless arguments to back me up. Woody Allen once said that he didn’t want to be immortal by living on through his work; he wanted to be immortal the old-fashioned way by not dying. That’s my plan too. Here’s the proofs... (MORE - details)

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Plato was right: Babies are born with an innate number sense
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/babies-are-born-with-an-innate-number-sense/

EXCERPT: But not everyone agrees with this emerging consensus, and a new wave of empiricism has emerged over the past decade. Critics who reject the existence of an ability to innately sense numbers highlight a broader and important scientific challenge: How could we ever know the contents of an infant’s or a nonhuman animal’s mind? As philosophers of cognitive science, we supplement thousands of years of philosophical thinking about this issue by drawing on a mountain of experimental evidence that simply was not available to past thinkers... (MORE - details)

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Reality's foundations lie beyond reason
https://iai.tv/articles/realitys-foundations-lie-beyond-reason-auid-3467?_auid=2020

INTRO: We like to think of the world as ultimately fully intelligible, a place that we will one day be able to make complete sense of, emotionally and rationally, a place where we might feel at home. But while this dream has seduced philosophers and scientists alike, it's ultimately a fantasy, argues G. Anthony Bruno. Whenever we try to make sense of the world—through experience, reason, art, or anything else—we find that our activity is shaped by certain brute conditions that are simply given, without reason. Philosophy’s task is not to dispel this strangeness, but to find how to live productively within it... (MORE - details)

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Texas A&M forbids a Plato reading in an intro philosophy course
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michae...-plato-reading-in-an-intro-philosophy-course/

Martin Peterson, a philosophy professor at Texas A&M University, was told this week by university administrators that he either would need to drop a discussion of race and gender issues and the writings by Plato on those topics from his introductory philosophy course or teach a different course.

[...] But the jarring nature of an order to remove any material by Plato, one of the most influential philosophers of all time, from a philosophy course was almost guaranteed to spur publicity and cause controversy. Ironically, it will lead to far more discussion and debate about race and gender issues than any single course could have ever generated. The university has stirred Plato’s pot... (MORE - details)
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